Anti-Semitism Comes to a City of Tolerance

My wife is Polish Catholic from Buffalo. I am a Jew from Boston. In Pittsburgh we found remarkable religious harmony that one terrible act of violence will not break.

By David M. Shribman

Mr. Shribman, a former reporter for The Times, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Oct. 28, 2018

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Mourners crowded outside in the rain to listen over speakers to a vigil service at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in Pittsburgh, PA a day after a deadly shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue.CreditCreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

PITTSBURGH — More than a third of this city is Catholic. The bishop always interrupts his Midnight Mass processional — stopping at the seventh row from the altar every Christmas Eve — to give a hug to the rabbi whose synagogue is down the street from the cathedral. There are six kosher food establishments in a two-block area of town. Yet the city’s signature sandwich is an unkosher mess of meat and creamy coleslaw, with fries mashed atop the glop.

The garment of choice every Friday before a Steelers game is a black-and-gold Ben Roethlisberger or Antonio Brown shirt. Hours later, at sundown, the streets are full of Jewish men in the black garb of the Orthodox and the observant on their solemn march to Sabbath prayers.

And so, in the eternal mix of irony and tragedy that is the human story, an anti-Semitic rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue has inflicted deep wounds on perhaps the least anti-Semitic city in the country.

Here Jewish and Protestant clergy swapped pulpits amid the 19th-century soot of the Industrial Revolution. Here, in the year after the 1892 Homestead steel strike, Rosh Hashana services were conducted in the club room of the volunteer fire company’s engine house down the street from where union activists and Pinkerton agents conducted one of the bloodiest labor battles in American history. Here, in 1885, the tensions between identity and assimilation took their form in perhaps the most important document of Reform Judaism, the Pittsburgh Platform.

And here, last year, David Zubik, the Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh, and Aaron Bisno, the rabbi at Rodef Shalom Congregation, boarded a plane together at Pittsburgh International and led a trip to Rome and Jerusalem. They called it the Pursuers of Peace Pilgrimage. Nobody thought it was the least bit remarkable. In recent weeks, when Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, Bishop Zubik’s predecessor at the Diocese of Pittsburgh, came under fire in the church abuse scandal, some of the deepest expressions of sadness about his role came from Pittsburgh Jews who remembered him as a constant presence in their pews.

When, on this cursed Saturday morning, gunfire broke out in Tree of Life, just three blocks from my home, the Jewish rhythms that are a part of the city’s beat seemed to take over the soundtrack of Pittsburgh. Hundreds gathered hours later at the corner of Murray and Forbes, where a clock tower with Hebrew letters has kept time for the Squirrel Hill neighborhood for a generation. There were, to be sure, rabbis in the crowd, but the vigil was dominated by the students from nearby Taylor Allderdice High School. For decades the few students in attendance in their school on Yom Kippur spent the day in study halls. There was no use teaching class during the High Holy Days.

There was no debate in our offices at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — where for years the reporter Steve Levin, gray beard drooping from his chin, black cap sitting on his skull, wrote luminous tone poems — about whether to describe Saturday’s massacre as a hate crime. The man charged with perpetrating it, who in his own online biographic profile asserted that “Jews are the children of Satan,” reportedly shouted anti-Semitic epithets as his gun spewed bullets. Around here angry shouts are reserved for the Cleveland Browns, bitter rivals to the north but a team that traveled to Heinz Field for a Sunday confrontation that suddenly seemed to lose its urgency.

In all of this, racing around town and then to the office to join my colleagues in chronicling this sad chapter in our city’s history, I could not repress a line that the presidential chronicler Theodore H. White wrote in the commemorative edition of Life magazine in the days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “One wished for a cry, a sob, a wail, any human sound.’’

And during the day of Pittsburgh’s suffering so many of us — not only Jews like me — wished for that cry, or any human sound, or perhaps even some shard of routine to ward off the certainty that the day was anything but routine. Now a confession on this time of surpassing sin: Amid it all I dropped by my home, within the sound of the sirens, and took the wet laundry out of the washer and placed it in the dryer. Something about cleanliness amid the sordidness made me need to do it.

Later that night, my wife, a Polish Catholic from Buffalo, and I together put those clean sheets on the bed. Cindy Skrzycki went from the nuns at St. Matthew’s School at East Ferry and Wyoming Streets in Buffalo to the daily Mass at Annunciation High School and finally to the tutelage of the Jesuits at Canisius College. In classic Pittsburgh style, her daughter — our youngest — is a year from ordination as a rabbi. She has asked for a special moment of silence Monday morning at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Our older daughter, Taylor Allderdice High School class of 2006 but now far away in San Francisco, sent this sober text: “Sleeping in my Pittsburgh shirt tonight.’’

We all slept in our Pittsburgh shirts Saturday night, for there had been no Shalom on Shabbat.